Awakening to our Soul-Rooted Participation with the World

What to Remember When Waking

We are privileged to be inhabitants of this exquisite, intricate web of relationships we call the World. Every flower, red-tail hawk, sunrise, and every human is a unique expression of life that comes into being in relationship to everything else. As cultural theologian Thomas Berry said, “Nothing is itself without everything else.” Every human is born to be in unique relationship with all other things of the world. Living and loving from the ‘place’ of our deepest relatedness, our deep belonging, is the most we can offer our troubled and beautiful world.

What to RememberWhen Waking invites you to engage with your night dreams as one way to support this quest. Soul speaks through the imagery and mysteries inherent in our dreams. We’ll work from the premise that each dream comes to change us; to do something to us. Each dream provides an opportunity for healing, maturation, integration, shedding of a too small skin, accessing deep insight or a vision, opening to revelation or numinous encounter, guiding us further into a passage or initiation, and more.

We will reenter the native landscape of soul–the dreamtime– assisted by embodiment, arts and imagination based dreamwork approaches. Rather than interpreting or using dreams as oracles for our day to day lives, we will re-enter our dreams, inviting them to do their change work on us.

In that first
hardly noticed
moment
in which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world where everything
began,
there is a small
opening into the day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.

What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.

What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember
the other worldIn this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.

You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.

Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you to your
one love?
What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow
and spread
its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine
for yourself?
in the open
and lovely
white page
on the waiting desk?